The Loneliness of Working Class Feminism: Women in the “Male

World” of Labor Unions, Guatemala City, 1970s

By, Deborah Levinson-EstradaPresented By, Whitney Pankonin

Trade Unionism

• 1950s and 1960s – workers rebuilt trade unionism despite violence against labor activists

• Subsequently – industry declined, violence continued

What has it taken for women to become labor activists?

• Sonia Oliva – 1970s union leader at Japanese-owned ACRICASA thread factory in Guatemala City

• How she became an activist - she “alone” stood outside of normal gender relations

• She understood she had to live apart from the constraints of gender to join a union

Oliva’s Background

• Grew up in rural and urban ladino (mestizo or non-Indian) Guatemalan world

• Rigid conventions of “proper” female and male rights, obligations – regardless of class

Male obligations

• Protect women and children• Be stable breadwinner• Public protector of the home• Macho – defend oneself and one’s family,

brave and bold

Women

• Defined as mothers• Homemakers• Emotional caretakers

• Men work for wages outside of home, thus work has greater social and economic value

Intersection of Class and Gender

• Gap between real and ideal male and female is wide in homes of working-class and poor families in Guatemala

• Guatemalan workers interviewed – central drama of their lives was the failure of fathers maintaining the success of the family – and the success of their mothers in doing so

Working Class

• Gender rules neither rejected nor strictly adhered to

• Live in gray are of gender “imperfection”• Preserve sense of women belonging in the

home – female work for wages outside the home is temporary labor (factory work)

• Problem of conventional ideas reappeared in the union

Women at Work: the ARCRICASA Union

• ARCRICASA opened 1973 • State-of-the-art machinery to make acrylic

thread for the Central American Common Market

• Sonia Oliva – “the machines got everything they needed to function 24 hours a day without hitches or failures, but we did not.”

Shop Floor Realities

• All workers shared low pay• 12 hour shifts• Lack of face masks against dust

• Problems specific to women: absence of toilets, supervisors felt entitled to slap women workers, no transportation to plant (pregnant women)

February 1975

• Group of men workers started organizing drive

• Oliva’s official leadership post chosen because – Labor Ministry mandated that unions have 9-person executive committee

• Women were elected to ACRICASA because there were not 9 men willing to risk being union officials

• Male trade unionists had to abide to Labor Ministry’s rules, if they wanted ACRICASA they had to accept women

• After union’s lawyer secured an injunction against company to prevent further firings – over 100 workers (most women) joined the union

• To win the union legal recognition – they often crowded into manager’s office – collectively demanded that management meet with union

• Fame as persistent trade unionists spread

Women from ACRICASA

• Taunted men workers:

• “We are women and we’ve organized…What have you men done?”

• Link between masculinity and class

Oliva

• Attended all meetings she could• Thought about the problems Guatemala faced• Took action whenever she saw the

opportunity• Opposed capitalism and the state

• Even after Oliva’s union won a contract in early 1977, workers continually had to pressure the company to abide by it

Demands of Conventional Motherhood

• Oliva brought son Pavel to meetings and demonstrations

• Did not leave her child in someone else’s care – she brought her son into world of activism

• When company did not implement a provision in the contract for day care – Oliva brought 40-day-old Pavel to work

• “to make a point”

1978 Union was Strong

• Succeeded in guaranteeing compliance with a good contract

• Union was active member of a broader labor movement that called for “Revolutionary Popular Government”

• State reacted strongly against the unions in the popular movement

Violence in ACRICASA

• July 1978 – 9 male and 26 female union members seized by police, taken to prison

• October – union leader Gonzalo Ac Bin assassinated

• Early 1979 – Oliva and Pavel kidnapped, beaten, forced to leave the country

• June 21, 1980 – union leaders Florencia Xocop and Sara Cabrera (7 months pregnant) kidnapped and disappeared

Working-Class Feminism

• Women violated “ideal” female behavior:• When they crowded into manager’s office,

painted signs, argued with labor inspectors, or occupied the plant

“Maternal Politics”

• Their activism not simply an extension of their gender identity as mothers, wives, daughters

• (identity of politics to defend kin “vicariously” as one feminist scholar calls maternal politics)

• Politics based in one’s femaleness

• One of ACRICASA’S first concessions to workers – installation of indoor toilets

• BUT – supervisors clocked workers • Ex) women stayed in bathroom over 4

minutes – brought soiled sanitary napkin on manager’s desk when she was reported

Mother’s Day Example

• By law Mother’s Day was paid holiday• ACRICASA granted it legally to married women• 1977 – single mothers demanded same right

and company refused (manager claimed because women were not married)

• “If you don’t give me this holiday because I am not a mother, I will lie on your desk and you bring a doctor in here to decide in front of everyone whether I am a mother.”

ACRICASA Women Workers:

• Do not fit neatly into categories sometimes used by scholars to describe women’s activism

• Not maternal, “womenist”, “genderless” politics

• Tension between accepting and rejecting one’s “proper” role, rights, and obligations

• Women in union did not question inequalities between men and women

• None took issue with fact that ACRICASA gave men better-paying jobs

• Most leaders were men, even though most union members were women

• Most women union members did not question gender roles to the extent that Oliva did

Day Care

• Potentially subversive to gender constructions – it can challenge the notion that women should be in the home

• Origins of day care in Guatemala – 1944-1954 feminist movement Alianza Feminina

• Day care centers established – 1947 Labor Code required factories with 40 + women workers to provide day care facilities

• Alianza Feminina (and most first-wave feminist groups in Latin America) had not departed from premise that child care was a women’s issue

• The demand that factories with a certain number of parents have day care facilities was unimaginable to progressive Guatemalan women in the 1940s

1970s• Male trade unionists opposed day care for

factories where they worked• They (the men) were killing themselves working

to have a “normal” family (a wife at home)• Many women said that their relatives at home

would be shocked at the thought of putting a child in day care when there were female relatives at home for just that purpose

• “even though my mother works (making food and selling it in front of the house), I would be rejecting her if I took my children to work with me every day”

Gendered Activism, Gender Troubles

• Activism demanded extraordinary public heroism – this sort of courage was male-associated character traite

“Don’t You Have Hair On Your Chests?”

• Men trade unionists became:• City’s best breadwinners, most steadfast

defenders of the family• Machismo was important to good trade union

leadership• “macho” – bullheaded worker, “think with his

balls”

• Masculinity was empowering to certain point – workers felt intellectually inferior

• Masculinity bound up with class action – “tough” “male” “worker”= “stupid” was connected with “worker”

Men Workers’ Defense of Women Workers

• “I remember that there were these managers, these middleclass young guys with their cute little cars. And when the harvest came they needed a lot of extra women to work, so they always picked the prettiest ones, and what they did afterwards (the managers), they took them to drink on Fridays, on the weekend, I don’t know what they did, and these poor women had to give in to what they wanted because they needed the job.”

Suggestions by Critics…

• This represents not outrage of sexual abuse – but “matter of messing with ‘our’ class’s women” (class struggle over women’s bodies)

• A question about who gets to sexually abuse• Line between “protect” and “possess” is thin

Men’s Mixed Feelings

• Organizing women into unions contradicted their views of male and female

• Treated women union member the way they always treated women – didn’t inform them of important meetings, decisions, problems, gossip

• Women recognized as important to the labor movement (like Oliva) were masculinized

• Male trade unionists rarely permitted own wives to be involved in unions

• Sexual possessiveness was at the heart of the matter

• Wives belonged to their husbands, could not be “re-genderized”

• Wives allowed to cook

Women’s Struggles:

• 1 – against company• 2 – against state

• 3 – against sanctioned models of gender behavior (men excluded from this struggle)

1980

• Repression – union destroyed

• Once women became involved in union activity, “unfeminine step”, they had greater capacity to see beyond gender constructs

• They did not glue their union work to gender constructs, as men did

Conclusion

• No genderless working-class struggle in Guatemala

• Guatemalan Marxist Left – maintained that women’s oppression has been the result of capitalism – that struggle for women’s rights and liberation against machismo has been secondary in importance to primary battle between classes

• Oliva’s history indicates that this is false dilemma: she had to challenge sexism to be a class activist

• A critical consciousness about class needs a critical consciousness about gender (vice versa)

• Women do not act only out of gender• Activism stems from the multiplicity of their

being, of which gender is a part• Levinson-Estrada concerned about

pigeonholing women’s activism into maternal or womenist politics

Oliva

• Both concentrated on issues of womanhood and rejected “woman” as an identity

• Oliva is exceptional, but feminists have always been the exception regardless of class, time, or place

• Normative gender identities have had time, habit, culture, and social structure on their side

• The stakes in trade unionism and feminism have been unusually high in Guatemala

• To act as a historical subject has been to stake one’s life

• Male Trade Unionists: live out lives in the personal realm that do not overturn familiar customs of gender

• Women Trade Unionists: face double insecurity of living with intense anxiety while traveling an unfamiliar emotional path alone

• “All this demands courage that surpasses extraordinary courage.”